When first starting Grand Order, the game can offer piles of content, and little guidance as to what you should prioritize. Worse, it isn’t just your AP at stake, deciding what to spend early mana prisms on can make a lasting difference to your account! Take some time to familiarize yourself with our guide to the goals every new player should have in mind and you’ll be in a much better position to tackle starting out!
New players should focus on catching up with story content, clearing weekly master missions, and buying the summon tickets in Da Vinci’s Workshop. Event farming is usually not efficient for new players.
What you should do daily, weekly, and monthly
GO, like most games of its type, features a few things you should keep in a regular schedule, even as a new player. To start, you should try to maintain a log-in streak each day for the rewards it offers and always stay on top of the weekly Master Missions. Second, do your daily free Friend Point summon, unlike many gacha games, some of Grand Order’s low-rarity characters are extremely useful. In addition, while your team cost limit is low, the Craft Essences it offers will tide you over until you can get better options. All the free summons you get through these methods can stack up pretty quickly if you keep track of them.
As a new player, more summons should always be your target. You should treat Mana Prisms as your second priority to assure you’re always buying your monthly summon tickets in Da Vinci’s Workshop. They’ll cost 100 prisms, so make sure you’re getting at least four mana prisms a day from the Chaldea Gate quests. I recommend an Ember Gathering run to get EXP cards; do the hardest one you can safely clear. Eventually, you’ll find yourself with several 3* Servants at NP5 and you can start turning friend points into prisms to help out. There are a total of 30 available per day without burning cards.
Early Goals
When you’re not keeping track of your daily and weekly cooldowns, you should be focused on clearing the story and unlocking the permanent Mystic Codes. One time story nodes feature high, sometimes guaranteed, drop rates for materials, and most events require a certain level of story completion to even participate. Prioritize story progress and use the materials and friend points you get from it to work on your servants in the meantime. You should only dedicate AP to farming Ember Gathering or Training Grounds if your progress is becoming slow.
Where the Mystic Codes are concerned, prioritize the Chaldea Combat Uniform (AKA plugsuit), then the Mage’s Association Uniform. The first is huge for Order Change giving you access to your benched units, the second brings Spiritron Transfer to ready Noble Phantasms and Command Shuffle to mitigate poor card draw RNG. The Atlas Academy Uniform is more niche and can wait.
The first large difficulty spike comes in Singularity 6: Camelot. If you make it through E Pluribus Unum without working on your Servants, that’s when you should settle in and get them ready. There are some cheese strategies that can get you through Camelot relying mostly on your Support Unit, but its final boss is a notorious wall. Do yourself a favor and get your Servants in shape by then.
Early Resource Spending
Most of the goals before are about getting your hands on materials or putting yourself in a position to get those materials. This naturally begs the question: what do I spend it on? Naturally, any high-rarity characters you have may look appealing. However, depending on their age, they may require materials you simply can’t get yet. Worse, while your team cost budget is low, they’ll eat up tons of points. Fielding an entire team of well-leveled bronze and silver characters with Craft Essences equipped is preferable to leaving slots empty. To avoid a troubling situation where you need to progress to level your characters but you also need to level your characters to progress, you should initially work on your tutorial roll characters and friend point options.
In addition to opportune gold cards you have, there are a few low rarity cards you should fast track. Most notably among craft essences are the three Black Keys and Dragon’s Meridian. For Servants, you’re looking for Archer Arash, Berserker Spartacus, and Caster Hans Christian Andersen.
Arash is a potent farming character who features even in endgame teams despite his one-star rarity. He’s pretty much only notable for using his Noble Phantasm, Stella, but it causes him to die and swap out. Once you can complete his strengthening, he gains Bow and Arrow Creation as a skill. This gives him access to a 30% NP charge and is his only skill worth leveling. Spartacus provides AoE on a budget with an NP charge skill of his own. When you have the two of them together, they can provide the core of a low-difficulty farming team even if your quartz rolls don’t provide you farmers.
On the other hand, Hans is often favorably compared to the SSR support casters for good reason. He provides consistent crit stars due to his Innocent Monster skill and provides a huge damage bonus to those crits with Human Observation. His Noble Phantasm provides a party-wide chance at both defense and attack buffs and can be used almost on demand thanks to High-Speed Incantation. His niche is in story progression and boss fights, though, not farming.
Should I farm events?
This is a complex question that changes from event to event. The short answer is no. On top of being locked until you complete certain story chapters, most feature higher difficulty nodes than the story section you need to complete. The majority of events are not efficient to spend your time on if you can’t clear these high difficulty farming nodes. These often feature basic enemies with 30,000-40,000 HP in their first wave.
If an event offers a free SR servant as a reward, usually called a welfare, or materials you need and can’t access you should try to invest enough time to get only those rewards. Don’t be afraid to use the low difficulty nodes in this case. Otherwise, keep working on the story or Ember Gathering to get your teams ready to tackle future events.